The Full Biography
Peter O’Toole. Actor. The man who began at the top of a desert and then spent fifty years proving a nomination is not the same thing as a statue.
This is his story.
The image most people still carry is a white robe, a camel, a blue stare in David Lean’s desert. The year was 1962. The picture was Lawrence of Arabia. What the still cannot show is Peter James O’Toole — Seamus, when he chose the Irish equivalent — born on a date and in a place the paper and the man never quite agreed on, a Leeds and Connemara argument, a RADA student, a drinker who then stopped, and an old man who tried to refuse an honorary Oscar because he had not finished losing.
The birth certificate that English clerks prefer says August 2, 1932, St James’s University Hospital, Leeds. The child of Constance Jane Eliot Ferguson, a Scottish nurse, and Patrick Joseph “Spats” O’Toole, an Irish metal plater, footballer, and bookmaker. He preferred Ireland, Connemara, a story that suited the voice. A complete file says both and does not pretend the poetry is a vital record. He grew up in Hunslet. The household toured racecourse towns. He was evacuated in the war. Catholic school. Nuns. He left for the Yorkshire Evening Post as a trainee journalist and photographer, then for the Royal Navy as a signaller. An officer asked what he had always wanted to do. Poet or actor, he said. The Abbey Theatre in Dublin rejected him because he could not speak Irish. RADA took him on a scholarship, 1952 to 1954, in a class with Albert Finney, Alan Bates, and Brian Bedford — “dotty,” the academy thought them. He carried British and Irish passports. Irishness, he told Charlie Rose, was almost the centre of his being.
The first shop was the Bristol Old Vic, 1956 to 1958: King Lear, The Recruiting Officer, Major Barbara, Othello, Henry Higgins in Pygmalion, Jimmy Porter in Look Back in Anger, Tanner in Man and Superman, Vladimir in Waiting for Godot. He met Siân Phillips on a provincial The Holiday that never reached the West End. The London door was Lindsay Anderson’s The Long and the Short and the Tall at the Royal Court in 1959, with Robert Shaw, then a transfer, then Best Actor of the Year. He turned down five long-term film contracts. A 1960 season at Stratford: Petruchio, Shylock, Thersites. “You’ve got to go to Stratford when you’ve got the chance.” Disney’s Kidnapped (1960) gave him bagpipes opposite Peter Finch. Nicholas Ray’s The Savage Innocents dubbed his voice. Jules Buck cast him in The Day They Robbed the Bank of England. They formed Keep Films. The heartbreak was losing the film of The Long and the Short and the Tall to Laurence Harvey.
The door the world kept is Lean. Albert Finney had been in the conversation and turned it down. O’Toole got Lawrence. He was twenty-nine on the screen and looked like a blade. Omar Sharif. Alec Guinness. A cut from a match to a desert that is still a grammar. He was nominated. He won the BAFTA. He did not win the Oscar. He would be nominated seven more times for the competitive award and never win. The joke became a climate. He did not love the joke. In 1963 he opened the National Theatre as Hamlet under Olivier, sick with nerves, an outgoing actor made to look melancholy. The loneliness of the part is the sentence he left on it.
What followed was not a lucky streak. It was a run that the drink both fed and taxed. Becket (1964), Keep Films with Hal Wallis, O’Toole as Henry II opposite Richard Burton’s Thomas — a financial success, a second nomination. Lord Jim (1965), Richard Brooks from Conrad, an epic that did not repeat Lean. What’s New Pussycat? (1965), Woody Allen’s first screenplay, a role meant for Warren Beatty, a huge success opposite Peter Sellers. William Wyler’s How to Steal a Million (1966) with Audrey Hepburn, a thief with manners. John Huston’s The Bible: In the Beginning... as the Three Angels. The Night of the Generals (1967) reunited him with Sharif and disappointed the box office. A cameo in Casino Royale. Then The Lion in Winter (1968) opposite Katharine Hepburn, two plants of the same weather, a Christmas court that is all knives. Henry II again. He is one of the few men nominated twice for playing the same king in two pictures. Another nomination. Great Catherine with Jeanne Moreau did not take. Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1969), a musical opposite Petula Clark, a softness the desert had not advertised. Another nomination. A Golden Globe. He was, for a stretch, the most complete imported leading man the 1960s had: the stare, the voice, a willingness to look ridiculous in the service of a line.
He fulfilled a lifetime ambition in 1970 as Vladimir again, opposite Donal McCann, at the Abbey — the house that had once refused him the language. Murphy’s War (1971) for Peter Yates. Under Milk Wood (1972) with Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, Keep Films from Dylan Thomas, not a popular success. The Ruling Class (1972), a mad aristocrat who thinks he is God and then Jack the Ripper, another nomination, the picture the specialists name when they want to stop talking about sand. Man of La Mancha (1972) opposite Sophia Loren: Cervantes and Quixote, a musical the critics punished for non-singers. His singing was dubbed by Simon Gilbert. The 1970s spent him. The drink was not a rumor. It was a schedule. Pictures thinned. Bristol Old Vic again, 1973–74: Uncle Vanya, Plunder, The Apple Cart. Otto Preminger’s Rosebud (1975) flopped. Man Friday closed Keep Films. Caligula (1979) as Tiberius, a Penthouse-funded scandal he shared with McDowell, Mirren, and Gielgud. In 1976 surgeons removed his pancreas and much of his stomach; the cancer had been misread as drink. Insulin-dependent diabetes. In 1978 a blood disease nearly took him. He stopped drinking when the body issued a last warning. The face that had been a blade became a clerk of a voice.
Then he came back, because that is what he did. The Stunt Man (1980) is a director as a devil, a nomination. Masada (1981) on television, an Emmy nomination as Silva. A Macbeth at the Old Vic for five hundred dollars a week that earned some of the worst notices of his life. My Favorite Year (1982) is a drunk matinee idol who still knows where the light is — a part that is also a confession without a press release. Another nomination. Man and Superman on stage, better received. The Last Emperor (1987), as Sir Reginald Johnston, tutor to a last emperor, a supporting turn inside Bertolucci’s China. Broadway Pygmalion (1987) opposite Amanda Plummer, 113 performances. Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell (1989) won him an Olivier and was almost too close: a Soho journalist who has already spent himself, a part he returned to on television in 1999.
The only exercise I take is walking behind the coffins of friends who took exercise.Peter O’Toole
In 2002 the Academy offered an honorary award. He wrote back that he was “still in the game” and would prefer to win the thing outright — defer it until he was eighty. They gave it anyway, in 2003. He walked out and took it. The speech was a man who had decided, after the letter, that manners were also a part. He had not finished losing. He had finished refusing the consolation prize, and then he had accepted it. Both letters are the life.
The turn is the desert and then the long refusal to become only the desert. A lot of men who make Lawrence at thirty spend the rest of the time being Lawrence. He became Chips, and a stunt-man’s director, and an old Venus, and a man who stopped drinking when the body issued a last warning. The O’Toole after the sand is more clerk of a voice than a saint of a stare. The clerk is the life. The stare is the climate.
Six things most people never knew
- Leeds and Connemara are both in the file. The clerk prefers Yorkshire. The man preferred Ireland. The voice made the argument unnecessary for audiences.
- Eight competitive nominations, zero wins. The honorary is 2003. The letter that tried to stop it is also the file.
- The Lion in Winter is a two-Hepburn weather. Katharine and a man who could stand in the same frame without vanishing.
- He stopped drinking after the body had already sent the bill. The 1970s are a caution. The 1980s are a return.
- My Favorite Year is a confession dressed as a farce. A matinee drunk who still knows the light. He knew the light.
- He almost refused the consolation. Then he took it, on his feet, because the game was still on.
He married Siân Phillips in 1959. Two daughters: Kate, who acted, and Patricia. The marriage ended in 1979; Phillips wrote, in two autobiographies, of drink and jealousy. With the model Karen Brown he had a son, Lorcan, born in Dublin on March 17, 1983, when O’Toole was fifty, a boy he wanted raised as an Irishman. He kept a house on Sky Road outside Clifden, County Galway, from 1963, and rooms in London and, at the height, the Paris Ritz. He knew the 154 sonnets and read them daily. He published Loitering with Intent: The Child (1992), a New York Times Notable Book, and The Apprentice (1996), the RADA years. Friends from the Old Vic describe a professional who was first with the verse and last to leave the pub, until the pub had to be left. The O’Toole in a 2003 tuxedo was a man who had already been a climate and was now a colleague accepting a prize he had tried to postpone. Both are the life.
The later years
The last decade was chosen work, not a fade. He had already written the childhood and the apprenticeship. He had already been Jeffrey Bernard on a stage that smelled like the life. What remained was a man in his seventies who still wanted a part, and then a man who decided he did not.
- Troy (2004) — Priam, a king who has already lost. Brad Pitt’s Achilles. A Hollywood epic that needed a voice more than a sword.
- BBC Casanova (2005) — the old adventurer; David Tennant the young one, in contact lenses to match the blue.
- Venus (2006) — Roger Michell. An old actor circling a young woman and his own end. He recites Sonnet 18. The eighth nomination. He was seventy-four. The town still would not give him the competitive statue.
- Ratatouille (2007) — Anton Ego, a critic who learns to taste again. Children who never saw Lawrence know the voice that reviews a rat.
- Stardust (2007) — a king on his deathbed naming an heir. A small part. A last fairy tale.
- The Tudors (2008) — Pope Paul III, seven episodes of excommunication. Dean Spanley the same year, with Jeremy Northam and Sam Neill.
He played Lassie (2005). He played Hindenburg in Hitler: The Rise of Evil (2003). He played Augustus. He took the jobs that still used the instrument. He lived in London. He kept the Irish story and the Clifden house. He kept the friends who had not gone into the ground behind him. On July 10, 2012, he released a statement: he was retiring. Stomach cancer had come back. A professional’s ending. He would not do the work half. A few pictures still in the can — Eldorado, For Greater Glory — arrived after the statement. He had already said the line.
He died on December 14, 2013, at the Wellington Hospital in St John’s Wood. He was eighty-one. The funeral was at Golders Green on December 21, a wicker coffin. The family said they would take the ashes to the west of Ireland, as he had asked. Bristol Old Vic Theatre School named a prize. St Paul’s, the Actors’ Church in Covent Garden, put up a plaque. The desert still played on Sunday afternoons. The honorary statue was already on a shelf. The eight envelopes he did not open were already a trivia question. The voice was the remainder.
After he was gone
Every desert picture still pays him a tax. Every actor who loses eight times still uses his name as a consolation that is also a wound. Lean’s cut from the match still teaches editors. Katharine still arrives in the same sentence when the Christmas court is mentioned. The letter to the Academy is the correction to the trivia. Kate and Lorcan remain. Clifden keeps the road.
He came out of a disputed birthplace, took a desert at twenty-nine, lost eight envelopes, took a ninth he had tried to refuse, stopped drinking, wrote the memoirs, and died in London with the stare still in circulation. If you only remember Lawrence, you have the still. If you remember the letter, Chips, Venus, and the coffins of the friends who exercised, you have him.
Portrait: ABC Television · Public domain · via Wikimedia Commons